Professor Ken Urano
IICEHawaii2017 Featured Speaker
Hokkai-Gakuen University, Japan
As a Featured Speaker at The IAFOR International Conference on Education – Hawaii 2017 (IICEHawaii2017), Professor Ken Urano of Hokkai-Gakuen University, Japan, will provide an overview of research and practice in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in Japan, while sharing his own experiences as a teacher and curriculum developer at his workplace, where students learn English for business purposes. His full abstract is available to read below.
Ken Urano is a professor at the Faculty of Business Administration, Hokkai-Gakuen University, in Sapporo, Japan, where he mainly teaches English to business students. He is also a visiting professor on the Graduate Program in Foreign Languages at Nagoya Gakuin University, where he supervises master’s students in English. His research interests include second language acquisition (SLA), especially acquisition of morphology and syntax, research methodology in SLA, task-based language teaching, English for specific purposes, and computer-assisted language learning.
Featured Presentation | Developing and implementing an English for Specific Purposes syllabus for business majors in Japan
English is a compulsory subject in secondary education in Japan, but most students, as well as teachers, do not have a clear goal for learning it because the number of people who actually need English in their lives is rather small. However, there is a certain demand for training of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in fields such as engineering, medicine and business, where communication in English is sometimes unavoidable. Such a demand is best accommodated at universities and colleges where the curriculum is set to help students develop skills to work in certain professions. In this talk I will first provide an overview of research and practice in ESP in Japan. I will then share my own experience as a teacher and curriculum developer at my workplace, where students learn English for business purposes.
See the full list of speakers for this event.
